OSCARS 2022: The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

It's hard to believe now, in our more cynical and knowledgeable age, but some people really were shaken by the televangelist scandals of the eighties and nineties. Maybe it’s just because I grew up around a lot of religious old Southern white ladies but I recall hearing audible dismay and disillusionment every time a TV preacher inevitably got caught with his pants down. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were the most visible figures of this era and, fittingly, had the flashiest downfall. Tammy Faye’s sympathetic outreach to the gay community earned her a redemptive arc later in life. A campy documentary about her was released in 2000. And now, twenty one years later, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” has been turned into an Oscar-nominated biography. 

Tammy Faye grew up in rural Minnesota, as the oldest child of a highly religious and scornful mother. While at North Central Bible College, she meets, falls in love with, and marries would-be preacher Jim Bakker. The two set off on a cross-country preaching trip, Tammy Faye’s energetic puppet shows drawing an audience. They soon form an alliance with Pat Robertson’s Christian Television Network, where Bakker creates The 700 Club. The two soon leave to form their own Christian TV channel, the Praise the Lord Network, which is hugely successful and makes them absurdly wealthy… And that wealth brings with it a number of scandals, which the absurdly naïve Tammy Faye is caught in the middle of. 

It’s easy to imagine that “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” was inspired by the success of “I, Tonya,” another biopic about a frequently mocked, contentious female figure of nostalgic lore. “I, Tonya” delicately walked the line between sympathizing with its protagonist and playing her outrageous story for laughs. “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” attempts a similar tonal balancing act, less successfully. Tammy Faye is portrayed as more humanistic than the sexist, greedy men around her. She believes that religion should stay out of politics and that gay men are deserving of God’s love too. As depicted here, she’s as much of a victim of Jim Bakker as the people he swindled. Yet Tammy Faye is such a cartoonish figure, and so complacent in the greed around her, that it’s hard to feel too sorry for her. She just wanted to love everyone, had a manipulative husband, and was kept pliable by drugs. But she also happily helped defraud a lot of people in the name of the Lord, a fact the film doesn’t interrogate too closely. 

If “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” shows its title character as a troubled but ultimately well-intentioned human being, it’s less ambiguous about her husband. From the minute he's introduced, Bakker is preaching prosperity gospel. When he discovers Christian television is a thing, he's more interested in that than his wife. After their financial problems begin to start, he immediately turns to begging for money from the viewers under the guise of Christian outreach. He knowingly uses Tammy to manipulate a potential investor in his Christian theme park idea. All of this goes down before the sex scandals and lawsuits that would end his career happen. There's no doubt in the filmmakers' minds that Jim Bakker is anything but a morally bankrupt con artist.

The uncertainty in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” over whether its title character's life is tragic or ridiculous, extends to the performances. The acting is frequently uncomfortably positioned between caricature and sincere impersonation. Even before Tammy Faye's infamous mascara is painted on, Jessica Chastain is covered in make-up so she's resembles the real life figure. She adapts a goofy Minnesotan accent and is thrust into frequently absurd situations, clearly playing them for comedy. Yet she attempts to humanize Tammy Faye too, perhaps more-so than the movie around her does, showing the clear joy the woman took in creating corny art and connecting with people. Chastain manages to find the pathos in the contrast between Bakker's ridiculous outward appearance, and the greed she was surrounded by, with the degree to which empathy motivated her. Andrew Garfield, who never convincingly looks like an old man, portrays Jim Bakker as a sniveling, feckless fiend who barely hides his criminality behind a pious exterior. Vincent D'Onofrio plays Jerry Falwell as an incredibly sinister figure, the film's villain.

Honestly, I don't blame anyone for not wanting to think about this too much but “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” devotes some screen time to the sex life of its main characters. Even before they marry, the two can barely contain their desires for one another. After marriage, Tammy Faye is eager to fulfill her wifely duties. It's another contrast in the story, between these people who advertise themselves as hyper-pious but still deal with lowly human emotions. It's another interesting thing in the film that it sort of glossed over after a while. The same can be said of how “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” depicts the duo's rise to fame. A little more time could've been devoted to showing how their network and Christian empire was built and how Jim Bakker's heart was consumed by greed. The film feels frustratingly thin at times, when some simple beefing up of the script would've improved things considerably.

While Tammy Faye would go onto become something of a camp icon, Jim Bakker would get right back into the televangelist grift after being released from prison. He currently hocks quack COVID cures and survivalist schlock, while shrieking apocalyptic philosophy, to what is presumably the most gullible audience in the world. If “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” had just recalculated its tone and script a little bit, it would've been a much stronger motion picture. As it is now, it's a promising movie that never reaches its full potential because it can't seem to decide how the viewer should respond to its main character. [6/10]